The CGIAR faces a world rapidly awakening from a long period of complacency about international agricultural research, a world in which there is at once increased international development assistance, for agricultural development and environmental issues in particular, and heightened high-level...

We build a simple model of legal dualism in which a pro-poor legal reform, under certain conditions, causes the conflicting custom to go some way toward producing the change intended by the legislator. It then acts as an "outside anchor" that exerts a "magnet effect" on the custom. We illustrate...

During the 1990s, several important communities of small-scale fishermen along the Senegalese coastline have adopted effort-restraining schemes on their own initiative, a rare occurrence in this type of fisheries. The paper is an attempt to understand these experiences and, in particular, to...

The purpose of this essay is to argue that process-regarding preferences or social norms are pervasive in traditional village communities, yet are subject to gradual erosion under the influence of new forces, particularly population growth and market penetration. This is illustrated with respect...

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the reasons for collective action failures and successes in natural resource management, and to understand, in the light of economic theory, the mode of operation of the factors involved whenever possible. In the first section, we clarify the notion of...

The question of the role of statutory law in social environments permeated by custom and traditional norms is particularly important when the state law aims to correct social inequalities embedded in the custom. The conventional view is that modern law often fails to take root in custom-driven...

This chapter tries to synthesize the progress that economists have made towards understanding various aspects of the role of religion in human societies from a development economics perspective. We start by reviewing the contributions that consider religious beliefs as exogenously given and try...

The empirical literature has established a strong link between the fact of being a Muslim-dominated country and indicators of political performance and democracy. This suggests the possible existence of a relation between religion, Islam in this instance, and societal characteristics. Bernard...